New advertising models: Target them or let them find you?

Just like everyone else, advertisers are trying to figure out how to take advantage of the opportunities offered by new technologies. Two divergent streams of thought seem to be emerging: making ads more personalized vs. trying to encourage audiences to select into seeing ads. The boundaries are not clear-cut – there are plenty of ads [...]

Letting go: Turn off the technology

At the risk of sounding like a hypocrite, a number of stories about people’s obsession technology have been worrying me. Teenagers aren’t getting enough sleep, we can’t put away our cell phones while driving or walking, we use technology while running errands or working out, and we don’t even leave our addiction behind when on [...]

An update: More technology on vacation

To pick up on a common theme, I’ve blogged several times before about the role of technology on vacation. I had mentioned in my previous post that I was curious to see how MyTracks might change the way we hiked through the national parks. And on the couple of hikes that we did use the [...]

Getting away: Vacationing with technology

Well, I didn’t think I’d have an opportunity to post while on vacation, but my experience has forced me to reflect on an earlier blog post about the pros and cons of bringing technology on vacation. I just spent the last two days in Rocky Mountain National Park, where cell service is basically non-existant.  It [...]

Journalists’ role: Taking the amusement out of news

For anyone who’s been a J201 TA, this comic (thanks to Hans for sending me this link) speaks to what we spend the first few weeks of the course discussing – and what our students write their first paper on (or at least they did when I taught the class). I really enjoyed the distilling [...]

Media and Search Credibility

This will probably come to no surprise to anyone who’s taught an introductory university course that requires students to do research, but for all the time they spend online, students remain uncertain about how to find credible information. A new study by Northwestern University researchers demonstrates that when performing a wide range of information-seeking activities [...]

In Online Journalism, Burnout Starts Younger – NYTimes.com

In Online Journalism, Burnout Starts Younger – NYTimes.com. In honor of this story, today’s post will be brief (for me at least). This article details changes in the culture of the news environment, with the change from a 24-hour news cycle to the 24-second news cycle. With news coming out constantly, there’s a lot of [...]

Facebook: Growing out-of-control?

With the recent news that Facebook has surpassed 500 million readers, or 1 out of every 13 people on the planet, it is worth considering its implications. Facebook remains the most popular social networking site across a host of countries, beating out other sites such as Twitter, MySpace, and Flickr (for a comparison, see here), [...]

Refudiating my previous post

In a previous post, I discuss the potential of social networking and its use by a host of Republican candidates. In it, I note that Sarah Palin has been widely praised for her use of these new resources to communicate with the public, from her Facebook page, which boasts nearly 2 million fans, to her [...]

The power of apology

No one could have missed Apple’s recent “woes,” with the release of the iPhone 4 – if a company over a million and a half units in their first weekend can have woes. Part of the cell phone debates that I wrote about in previous posts have centered on the problems in reception for the [...]